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This book is dedicated to the political economy of one of the major states of the Hellenistic world, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon in north-western Asia Minor. In the third century bc, the Attalid dynasts of Pergamon were relatively minor players in Hellenistic great-power politics. In 188 bc, after Rome's victory over the Seleukid king Antiochos III, the Attalids were granted the lion's share of the former Seleukid territories in western and inner Anatolia; at a stroke, the Attalids were elevated to the status of one of the major powers of the eastern Mediterranean. But this new-found prominence came at a price. Since the vast expanse of Attalid Asia Minor had been won not by conquest, but by gift of the Roman senate, the ideological and bureaucratic structures through which the second-century Attalid rulers administered their kingdom differed sharply from those of the other major Hellenistic dynasties. The late Attalid monarchs were forced to develop a new non-charismatic royal style and ideology. A full reassessment of the character of Attalid Asia Minor is long overdue. This book is chiefly concerned with the political economy of the second-century Attalid kingdom, and in particular the three major themes of money, international relations, and the functioning of the state.

The reign of Emperor Basil II is usually considered the high-water mark of medieval Byzantium. During Basil's reign, Byzantine political authority extended from southern Italy to the Euphrates. With the conversion of the Rus to Orthodoxy in 988, the empire's cultural influence stretched still further. Basil portrayed himself as a soldier emperor who was as implacable towards his domestic opponents as against his foreign neighbours. His brutal conquests later earned him the sobriquet ‘Bulgar-slayer’. This book considers the problems inherent in governing such a large, multi-ethnic empire; it examines the solutions that Basil adopted particularly on the Byzantine frontiers. It explains how the extant sources make unmasking the political realities of this period so difficult, and demonstrates that a convincing picture of Basil's reign only emerges once these sources are understood in their original contexts. Particular attention is paid to the impact that the Synopsis Historion (also known as the Synopsis Historiarum) of John Skylitzes, a little-studied text from the reign of Emperor Alexios Komnenos (1081-1118), has on our understanding of Basil. As the late 11th-century context in which Skylitzes operated is exposed, so the political, military, and administrative history of Basil's reign is reconstructed. Basil's Byzantium is revealed as a state where the rhetoric of imperial authority became reality through the astute manipulation of force and persuasion.

This book examines the relationship between the Roman Empire, the Empire of Sasanian Iran, and their Arab clients, the Jafnids, Nasrids, and Hujrids, at the end of antiquity. Building on recent work in the field, it offers new conclusions about the role played by these two empires in the development of Arab political and cultural identity before Islam, and places the Jafnids, Nasrids, and Hujrids within the framework of current debates on the history and culture of Late Antiquity. Exploring three distinct areas — religious and cultural life (particularly Christianity), political activity, and the role of Old Arabic, the work traces the increasing political and cultural visibility of Arab elites at the edges of the Roman and Sasanian empires, and explains these changes from the perspective of the effects and influences of imperial alliance. In its exploration of how some aspects important for the later development of Muslim Arab identity were embedded in the context provided by the two empires of Rome and Sasanian Iran, the study emphasises the importance of the world of Late Antiquity for the our understanding of Arab history and identity.

Though the subject of classical reception in early modern Europe is a familiar one, modern scholarship has tended to assume the dominance of Greece and Rome in engagements with the classical world during that period. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe, establishing the diversity and expansiveness of the classical world known to authors like Shakespeare and Montaigne in what we now call the ‘global Renaissance’. And yet global Renaissance studies has tended to look away from classical reception, exacerbating the blind spot around the significance of the ancient near east for early modern Europe. Yet this wider classical world supported new modes of humanist thought and unprecedented cross-cultural encounters, as well as informing new forms of writing, such as travel writing and antiquarian treatises; in many cases, and befitting its Herodotean origins, the ancient near east raises questions of travel, empire, religious diversity, cultural relativism, and the history of European culture itself in ways that prompted detailed, engaging, and functional responses by early modern readers and writers. Bringing together a range of approaches from across the fields of classical studies, history, and comparative literature, this volume seeks both to emphasize the transnational, interdisciplinary, and interrogative nature of classical reception, and to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of the texts, concepts, and materials of the ancient near east, specifically, to early modern culture and scholarship.

The Byzantine–Islamic transition and the spread of Islam in the Near East has been widely debated in the past thirty years. The traditional approach, claiming a swift Arab conquest which triggered a rapid transition from Christianity to Islam, was challenged from various directions. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of archaeological findings from hundreds of excavated sites, this book addresses the transformation of local societies in Palestine and Jordan between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Its main argument is that archaeological findings provide a reliable though complex picture, indicating that the Byzantine–Islamic transition was evidently a much slower and gradual process than previously concluded. It involved regional variability, diverse settlement patterns, and different types of populations; it varied in the large cities, the medium-sized towns, the agricultural hinterlands, and the nomadic fringe settlements; local societies struggled to keep their old traditions and beliefs, while the newly introduced Muslim population gradually penetrated into the region. The book takes the reader from the remote corners of the Negev desert to the heart of the settled lands and the urban centres of Palestine and Jordan. The discussion evaluates the process of change in a dynamic multicultural society, showing that the coming of Islam had no direct effect on settlement patterns and the material culture of the local population. The gradual change in settlement culminated during the Early Islamic period, and collapse occurred as late as the eleventh century. The process of Islamization was even slower, and Christianity prevailed under Islamic rule as late as the eleventh century. The archaeological findings provide a firm basis for a reconsideration of current historical paradigms, and promote a rethinking of the impact of political, cultural, and religious change on the local populations of the Near East between the sixth and eleventh centuries.

The late medieval eastern Mediterranean, before its incorporation into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, presents a complex and fragmented picture. The Ayyubid and Mamluk sultanates held sway over Egypt and Syria, Asia Minor was divided between a number of Turkish emirates, the Aegean between a host of small Latin states, and the Byzantine Empire was only a fragment of its former size. This book seeks to find common themes that unite this disparate world. Focusing on religious identity, cultural exchange, commercial networks, and the construction of political legitimacy among Christians and Muslims in the late medieval eastern Mediterranean, the chapters discuss and analyse the interaction between these religious cultures and trace processes of change and development within the individual societies. An introduction provides a broad geopolitical context to the contributions and discusses at length the broad themes which unite the chapters and which transcend traditional interpretations of the eastern Mediterranean in the later medieval period.

This book looks at the relations between Byzantium and its eastern neighbours in the thirteenth century. The main conclusion is that the Nicaean Empire (1204-61) was much stronger and much more the heir of the twelfth-century Empire than has generally been appreciated. Furthermore, it was recognized as such by its eastern neighbours throughout the period. The Nicaean Empire gained dominant influence over the Seljukid Sultanate of Rūm in the 1250s. The appearance of the Mongols added a complicating factor, which the Byzantines at first managed effectively. However, in the last quarter of the century the continued decline of Seljuk power, the continuing migration of Turks from the east, and what effectively amounted to a lack of Mongol interest in western Anatolia allowed the creation of powerful Turkish nomadic confederations in the frontier regions facing Byzantium. By 1304 the nomadic Turks had broken Byzantium’s eastern defences. The Empire lost its Asian territories forever; and Constantinople became the most eastern outpost of Byzantium. The thirteenth century is a period of consistent success for Byzantine diplomacy towards the Seljuks and the Mongols. However, successful relations with the great powers of the age were not ultimately a key factor for the successful defence of Byzantine Asia Minor.

This book offers a study of the calendars of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, Gaul, and all other parts of the Mediterranean and the Near East, from the origins up to and including Jewish and Christian calendars in late Antiquity. Particular attention is given to the structure of calendars and their political context. Most ancient calendars were set and controlled by political rulers; they served as expressions of political power, as mechanisms of social control, and sometimes, on the contrary, as assertions of political independence and dissidence. Ancient calendars were very diverse, but they all shared a common history, evolving on the whole from flexible, lunar calendars to fixed, solar schemes. The Egyptian calendar played an important role in this process, most notably inspiring the institution of the Julian calendar in Rome, the forerunner of our modern Gregorian calendar. In this book it is argued that the rise of fixed calendars was not the result of scientific or technical progress, but of major political and social changes that transformed the ancient world under the great Near Eastern, Hellenistic, and Roman Empires. The institution of standard, fixed calendars served the administrative needs of these extensive empires, but also contributed to their cultural and political cohesion. This ultimately led, conversely, to late antique perceptions of calendar diversity as an expression of heresy and cause of social schism.

Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950) offers fresh perspectives on the origins of the economic success of the early Islamic caliphate, identifying a number of previously unnoticed or underplayed yet crucial developments, such as the changing conditions of labour, attitudes towards professional associations, and the interplay between the state, Islamic religious institutions, and the economy. Moving beyond the well-studied transition between the death of Justinian in 565 and the Arab-Muslim conquests in the seventh century, Caliphs and Merchants focuses on the period of assertion of the Islamic world’s identity and authority. While the extraordinary prosperity of Near Eastern cities and economies in 700–950 was not unprecedented when one considers the early imperial Roman world, the aftermath of the Arab-Muslim conquests saw a deep transformation of urban retail and craft, which marked a break from the past. This book explores the mechanisms through which these changes resulted from the increasing involvement of caliphs and their governors in the patronage of urban economies, alongside the empowerment of enriched entrepreneurial tāǧir from the ninth century, as well as how they served the Arab-Muslim elite to secure their power and legitimacy. This book combines a wide corpus of literary sources in Arabic with original physical and epigraphic evidence. The approach is both comparative and global. The Middle East is examined in a Eurasian context, parallels being drawn between the Islamic world and Western Christendom, Byzantium, South East Asia, and China.

This book analyzes the history of China between the 11th century BCE and 1911 under the guidance of a new theory of social change. It centers on two questions. First, how and why China was unified and developed into a bureaucratic empire under the state of Qin in 221 BCE? Second, how was it that, until the nineteenth century, the political and cultural structure of China that was institutionalized during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–8 CE) showed great resilience, despite great changes in demography, socioeconomic structure, ethnic composition, market relations, religious landscapes, technology, and in other respects brought by rebellions or nomadic conquests? In addressing these two questions, the book also explains numerous other historical patterns of China, including but not limited to the nature of ancient China interstate relations; the logics behind the rising importance of imperial Confucianism during the Western Han dynasty and behind the formation of Neo-Confucian society during the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE); the changing nature of China’s religious ecology under the age of Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism; the pattern of interactions between nomads and sedentary Chinese empires; the rise and dominance of civilian government; and the impossibility for China to have an indigenous development of industrial capitalism without being compelled by the Western and Japanese imperialism (despite late imperial China’s highly commercialized economy).

The guiding premise of this book is the role of the study of the city, its display and dissemination, in the information network of digital cities. A collection of essays on the ways the city can now be studied and presented, this book surveys the current situation in regard to various visualizations of cities of the past and present, built on historical evidence and scientific hypothesis. The chapters reflect the authors’ wide-ranging fields of interest and experience, from archeology to urban planning. Current methods of visualization, including 3D models and virtual reality simulations, are described and critiqued, primarily in regard to the field of cyber-archeology. Thus, the book offers a view of cities in the digital realm as simultaneously memory, imagination, and experience. In this way, it depicts how the ever-changing character of the past, present, and future is reformulated and re-presented in our digital era.

The rich and diverse architectural traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and adjacent regions are the subject of this book. Representing the visual residues of a “forgotten” Middle Ages, the social and cultural developments of the Byzantine Empire, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East parallel the more familiar architecture of Western Europe. The book offers an expansive overview of the architectural developments of the Byzantine Empire and areas under its cultural influence, as well as of the intellectual currents that lie behind their creation. The book alternates chapters that address chronological or regional developments with thematic studies that focus on the larger cultural concerns, as they are expressed in architectural form.

In spite of the Orthodox liturgy’s reputation for resistance to change, Byzantine liturgical dress underwent a period of extraordinary elaboration from the end of the eleventh century onwards. As part of this development, embroideries depicting holy figures and scenes began to appear on the vestments of the clergy. Examining the surviving Byzantine vestments in conjunction with contemporary visual and textual evidence, this book relates their embroidered imagery both to the program of images used in churches, and to the hierarchical code of dress prevailing in the imperial court. Both sets of visual cross-references serve to enforce a reading of the clergy as living icons of Christ. Finally, the book explores the competing configurations of the hierarchy of heaven as articulated in imperial and ecclesiastical art. It shows how the juxtaposition of real embroidered vestments with vestments depicted in paintings, allowed the Orthodox hierarchy to represent itself as a direct extension of the hierarchy of heaven.

The book contains twelve chapters, by various authors, discussing aspects of the Greek and Egyptian bilingual and trilingual inscriptions from Egypt during the Ptolemaic period, from the conquest by Alexander the Great (332 BC) to the death of Kleopatra VII (30 BC). It is intended as a complement to the publication of the full texts, with up-to-date commentaries and images, of about 650 inscriptions on stone. These include major decrees of priestly colleges, such as the Rosetta Stone, and a great variety of religious and secular monuments from the whole of Egypt, from Alexandria to Philae. The subjects covered include the latest technologies for digital imaging of stone inscriptions, the character of Egyptian monuments with Greek text, the survival and collection of bilingual monuments in the nineteenth century through excavation and the antiquities trade, religious dedications from Alexandria and elsewhere, the civic government of Greek foundations and public associations, the role of the military in public epigraphy, verse epigrams, onomastics, and palaeography. Overall, the collection offers a comprehensive review of the social, religious, and cultural context of the great inscribed monuments of the Ptolemaic dynasty which are key sources for understanding the coexistence of two different cultures and the impact of Ptolemaic rule and Greek immigration in Egypt.

This volume focuses on questions of Greek and non-Greek cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East during a broadly defined Hellenistic period from 400 BCE–250 CE. While recent historiographical emphasis on the non-Greek cultures of the eastern Mediterranean is a critical methodological advancement, this volume re-examines the presence of Greek cultural elements in these areas. The regions discussed—Asia Minor, Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia—were quite different from one another; so, too, were the cross-cultural interactions we can observe in each case. Nevertheless, overarching questions that unite these local phenomena are addressed by leading scholars in their individual contributions. These questions are at the heart of this volume: Why did the non-Greek communities of the Eastern Mediterranean engage so closely with Greek cultural forms and political and cultural practices? How did this engagement translate into the daily lives of the non-Greek cultures of Asia Minor, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Egypt? Local engagement differed from region to region, but some elements, such as local forms of the polis and writing in the Greek language, were attractive for many of the non-Greek communities from fourth-century Anatolia to second-century Babylon. The Greek empires and the Greek communities of the Eastern Mediterranean, too, were transformed by these local interpretations. The presence of adapted, changed, and locally interpreted Greek elements deeply entrenched in each community’s culture are for us the many forms of Hellenisms, but it is ultimately these categories, too, that this volume wishes to examine.

This book offers an interpretation of the two fragmentary texts of the P. Vindobonensis G 40822, now widely referred to as the Muziris papyrus. Without these two texts, there would be no knowledge of the Indo-Roman trade practices. The book also compares and contrasts the texts of the Muziris papyrus with other documents pertinent to Indo-Mediterranean (or Indo-European) trade in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. These other documents reveal the commercial and political geography of ancient South India; the sailing schedule and the size of the ships plying the South India sea route; the commodities exchanged in the South Indian emporia; and the taxes imposed on the Indian commodities en route from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. When viewed against the twin backdrops of ancient sources on South Indian trade and of medieval and early modern documents on pepper commerce, the two texts become foundational resources for the history of commercial relationships between South India and the West.

This book is an historical-critical study of Jewish slavery in antiquity, comparing the Jewish discourse on slavery with Graeco-Roman and Christian attitudes, and the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish attitudes towards slavery in Hellenistic and Roman times. It subverts many traditional views of Jews and slavery in antiquity; for example, showing against the traditional opinion that after the Babylonian Exile Jews refrained from employing slaves, that slavery remained a significant phenomenon of ancient Jewish everyday life, and generated a discourse which resembled Graeco-Roman and early Christian views while at the same time preserving specifically Jewish nuances. It examines the impact of domestic slavery on the ancient Jewish household and on family relationships, discusses the perceived advantages of slaves over other types of labor, and evaluates their role within the ancient Jewish economy. The ancient Jewish experience of slavery seems to have been so pervasive that slave images also entered theological discourse. Like their Graeco-Roman and Christian counterparts, ancient Jewish intellectuals did not advocate the abolition of slavery, but they used the biblical tradition and their own judgements to ameliorate the status quo.

This work offers a sweeping reassessment of the Jiankang Empire (third to sixth centuries CE), known as the Chinese “Southern Dynasties.” It shows how, although one of the medieval world’s largest empires, Jiankang has been rendered politically invisible by the standard narrative of Chinese nationalist history, and proposes a new framework and terminology for writing about medieval East Asia. The book pays particular attention to the problem of ethnic identification, rejecting the idea of “ethnic Chinese,” and delineating several other, more useful ethnographic categories, using case studies in agriculture/foodways and vernacular languages. The most important, the Wuren of the lower Yangzi region, were believed to be inherently different from the peoples of the Central Plains, and the rest of the book addresses the extent of their ethnogenesis in the medieval era. It assesses the political culture of the Jiankang Empire, emphasizing military strategy, institutional cultures, and political economy, showing how it differed from Central Plains–based empires, while having significant similarities to Southeast Asian regimes. It then explores how the Jiankang monarchs deployed three distinct repertoires of political legitimation (vernacular, Sinitic universalist, and Buddhist), arguing that the Sinitic repertoire was largely eclipsed in the sixth century, rendering the regime yet more similar to neighboring South Seas states. The conclusion points out how the research reorients our understanding of acculturation and ethnic identification in medieval East Asia, generates new insights into the Tang-Song transition period, and offers new avenues of comparison with Southeast Asian and medieval European history.

In 14th century BC, the Hittites became the supreme political and military power in the Near East. How did they achieve their supremacy? How successful were they in maintaining it? What brought about their collapse and disappearance? This book,which describes the Hittite kingdom, seeks to answer these questions. Hittitology is a relatively new discipline in the field of Near Eastern studies. Little more than a century ago, when important advances had already been and were continually being made in the study of the Bronze Age civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Hittites were regarded as no more than a small Canaanite tribe living somewhere in Palestine — an assumption based on a few scattered biblical references. We now know that Hatti, the kingdom of the Hittites, was one of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age, rivalling and eventually surpassing in the 14th century its two most powerful contemporaries, the kingdoms of Mitanni and Egypt. From their capital Hattusa in central Anatolia, the kings of the Land of Hatti controlled a widespread network of vassal states, which at the height of Hittite political and military development in the 14th and 13th centuries extended from the Aegean coast of Anatolia in the west through northern Syria to Damascus in the south, to the western fringes of Mesopotamia in the east.

Transport has been seen as one of the greatest failures of ancient technology. Land transport especially, due to its cost, restricted growth in the Roman economy. This book challenges these views, using the evidence of papyri from Roman Egypt, and argues that land transport, even in a country so dominated by a river which provided a natural highway, was an essential part of a system of transport that allowed for vigorous trading activity, but provided the Roman state with valuable resources which, through careful management, it could use for its own transport requirements: supplying the Roman army, transporting tax profits, and transporting bulk commodities such a stone for imperial building projects. It explores the economics of animal ownership, the role of transport in the agricultural and commercial economies of Egypt, state bureaucracy and the organization of transport. It examines the complex relationship between the state and private individuals and seeks to show that transport by land formed a vital part of everyday economic activity in Egypt. It contributes to our understanding of the economy of a Roman province and argues for a positive view of the role of transport in the ancient economy.